


Just a Few Things That You Won't

by afinecollector (orphan_account)



Series: Not Waving but Drowning [19]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 21 - Freeform, CVA, Cardiovascular Accident, Drug Use, Epilepsy, Family, Fit, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, JME, Janz Syndrome, Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy, Memories, Mummy's POV, POV, Seizure, Seizures, Sherlock is laughing, TW: drug use, Tia - Freeform, Transient Ischaemic Attack, Twenty-First Birthday, epileptic, fitting, h/c, stroke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 13:08:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7509610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/afinecollector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Violet is taken up on a great wave of sadness on the day of Sherlock's twenty-first birthday as she realises there are so many missed opportunities for her boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just a Few Things That You Won't

It didn’t usually sting Violet’s mind when she considered Sherlock’s life, not day to day, at least. Sherlock was just Sherlock, and he had grown into a frightfully handsome young man, almost like her father whilst still being very much a Holmes and taking on a large portion of her husband’s genes. On this, his twenty-first birthday, however, she considered the milestones he hadn't hit at this point in his life that Mycroft seemed to have reached. Not in terms of developmental or emotional growth - she’d seen both boys grow and develop well - but in terms of social goals and rites of passage, Sherlock seemed to be way behind in the field. 

Sherlock did not possess a driver’s license and he never would. Mycroft had received a brand new car for his seventeenth birthday, along with a string of lessons to teach him to drive the damnable thing. She hadn’t thought much of it when Sherlock had turned seventeen, and his birthday gift was a replacement violin following an unfortunate accident with the one he’d previously owned. But now, watching Sherlock and his father play an odd game of Slaps in the lounge, she considered that Sherlock should be out with friends of some kind, driving his four-year-old car around and bemoaning his need for a new one. As it stood, Sherlock didn’t even possess the practical ability to start a car. 

He didn’t seem to desire it but, of course, she knew that if he wanted to, Sherlock could drink. His medication wasn’t really a good facilitator for anything alcoholic - everything he took for the control of his seizures could bring about more seizures when combined with alcohol - but there was nothing that would physically stop him from going out and drinking himself into a stupor. And yet he didn’t. He had spent his eighteenth birthday drinking milkshake at his Grandmother’s house, and now - at twenty-one years old, almost to the minute - he was sipping from a cup of sweet tea in his childhood home. 

Not that it was in his nature to even want to, but Violet wondered if it was even feasible for Sherlock to spend a summer afternoon in the bright sunshine at a theme park, or in a public swimming pool with a girlfriend. Would the fast-moving motions of the roller coasters and subsequent excitement bring on a seizure that would ultimately prove too dangerous for the precarious position, dangling upside down in a cart? Would he drown if he got too giggly or sexually playful with somebody at the beach or in a pool, be struck with an overly dramatic fit and fall to the base of the pool? 

She was not naive, she knew her son was not open about every aspect of his life, but she wondered if Sherlock had not brought home a girlfriend - or, indeed, a boyfriend - because his relationships never worked out on account of his seizures. Did the throes of sexual ecstasy bring about too much of an emotional change within his brain that it caused too many electrical impulses and sent him into convulsions, putting a stop to anything romantic beyond a hand hold or a kiss? Or did Sherlock possess such anxiety over the potential of having a seizure that he just avoided people all together?

She sighed and pushed a smile to her lips as her husband and youngest laughed together, content in their game of quiet stupidity and restlessness. She wondered if there was ever a time that Sherlock blamed her for his brain not working quite as it should. Did he think it was something she had passed to him in her genes? Did he blame her for making his life that little more difficult than it ought to be? Did he look at his older brother and wonder ‘why me’? 

There was a lot Sherlock had continued to embrace, pushing his epilepsy aside and managing to make it to where he wanted to be, and for that she was happy. Sherlock would graduate university at twenty-two and he would have so many channels open to him. And, right now, in this moment, he looked settled and contented and happy, and of course that brought her immeasurable joy. Sherlock’s laughter wasn’t something he had heard often since he was very young and to see it now, in the twenty-one year old’s eyes as his heavy right hand collided against his father’s in a winning move, it felt like she was transported back to her boys being babies, being needy and reliant. 

Wish as she did for reliance on her from her boys, she would never have imagined it would come in the form of Sherlock being permanently on guard of himself. Sherlock being reliant on her for reassurance, or a hug, or for Sunday dinners on the sofa and Christmas days spent together - the four of them - that is what she had wanted. She didn’t imagine it would come to her in the form of Sherlock convulsing on the lounge floor, wetting himself and choking on thick saliva and unable to talk or move, sometimes for hours. 

It was not supposed to be _this way_. Her boys were supposed to be grown up now and independent and individual and successful. That wasn’t to say that they weren’t, not in their own rights, but Sherlock’s health meant she received at least a monthly phone call from the university informing her that Sherlock had ‘had a bad one’, or had to be ‘hooked up to the EEG at the hospital’, or that he was yet again off his medication because ‘it made him feel unwell’. The worst call, though, had come when Sherlock had been hospitalised for a heroin overdose, coupled with the diazepam he’d been taking when he didn’t really need it. They had never suspected that Sherlock would take drugs - not those kinds of drugs. He’d overdosed, seized, and was put into a coma and spent a whole six weeks regaining his speech because his brain seemed to have completely given up and they saw him suffer what, in medical terms, was a mild stroke. 

She could still hear the remnants of that time in his voice now; he lisped when he talked, something that would forever remind her that her son’s brain was imperfect, that he was a drug-user, an epileptic and a depressive and all of those complaints had rammed together and formed the near-death experience that had, since, seen her son return to her almost completely. Apart from the lisp. How did her blue-eyed, curly-haired, cherub-faced little boy change from loving, needy and wanting to be a Pirate to an epileptic with chronic clinical depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and a penchant for heroin that had to be monitored? How? It wasn’t supposed to go like that. 

“Mum?” 

Violet blinked and smiled at her son, “Yes, my darling?” 

“You were daydreaming.” Siger smiled, “We thought Sherlock was rubbing off on you.” 

Sherlock gave a laugh in his throat, “Is epilepsy contagious?” 

Siger smirked at the comment, then broke into a full laugh, “Don’t kiss me if it, son.” He was pleased with himself when Sherlock laughed along with him. 

How was this funny to them? How could a lifelong condition that sometimes kept her son in a locked position when his arm would not stop contracting in against his ribcage despite intervention, be in the slightest bit funny? Where did Sherlock find the strength to laugh when she only wanted to cry, to sweep the diagnosis under the rug and pretend it had not been plastered on her son’s forehead for the last ten years?

“You two,” Violet rolled her eyes, and pushed herself up from the sofa in the hopes that disappearing into the kitchen would hide the fact that she was crying. 

“Mum?” Mycroft looked up from the breakfast table.

Violet jumped. She’d forgotten Mycroft was there. “Mike,” She smiled wearily at him. “Don’t mind me. Happy tears; listen to him,” She gestured back at the door. “I haven’t heard Sherlock laugh like that in the longest time.” 

Mycroft’s brow furrowed, “Is he high?” 

Violet swatted his shoulder, and held onto him as she let her tears fall. “Oh, Mikey, I hope not.”


End file.
